In Cameroonian Election, Biya Unsurprisingly Secures Seventh Term

Paul Biya was re-elected the President of Cameroon.

Results of the October 7 presidential election in Cameroon have confirmed the re-election of 85-year-old incumbent Paul Biya, despite widespread allegations of fraud and voter intimidation. Biya is already the continent’s second-longest-serving head of state, having served for 36 years at the helm. His latest electoral victory gives him a mandate to extend this reign into a seventh consecutive term.

A total of 18 petitions calling for the annulment of the election were presented to Cameroon’s Constitutional Council before all legal challenges were rejected. For many, this was no guarantee of a free and fair election, especially considering Biya’s jurisdiction over appointments to the Council. Moreover, several petitions were rejected due to insufficient evidence, which is hardly surprising due to the nature of Cameroon's electoral procedure: legal challenges must be resolved prior to the release of polling results, but this data might itself constitute substantive evidence. Even setting aside allegations of electoral fraud, this result is unsurprising for a number of reasons.

First, Biya’s extensive experience and position as the candidate of the ruling party accords him a decisive advantage in terms of campaigning resources. Accordingly, his campaign received triple the coverage of all other candidates from Cameroon’s national media across television, radio, and print. It is disparities like these that prompt Kah Walla, who ran against Biya in the 2011 election as Cameroon’s first female presidential candidate, to declare Cameroon an “electoral dictatorship.”

Additionally, the preponderance of opposition candidates may have actually hindered their effectiveness. As analyst Landry Signé explains in the Washington Post, the absence of a united opposition splits the popular vote as people rally behind multiple credible candidates. Cognizant of this risk, opposition parties FDP and MRC had announced their plan to form a coalition to dislodge Paul Biya, with FDP leader Akere Muna withdrawing his candidacy to put his support behind MRC frontrunner Maurice Kamto. However, even this attempt fell short in its failure to incorporate six other opposition candidates, most notably Joshua Osih of the Social Democratic Front.

The weakness of opposition to Biya’s election is entangled within a much larger context of civil unrest. The October 7 election took place amid escalating sectarian tensions in western Cameroon between Anglophone secessionists and government forces. Claiming marginalization under Francophone-majority rule, the nation’s Anglophone minority seeks to carve out a separate nation they call Ambazonia.

The coexistence of two different linguistic, legal, and educational systems is part of the country’s colonial legacy. After World War I, then-German Kamerun was divided into French and British mandates. When independence was finalised in the 1960s, Anglophone territories were given a vote on whether to join independent Cameroon or neighbouring Nigeria; they chose Cameroon.

Today, most of Cameroon’s three million citizens are French-speaking, however English-speakers, centred in two of the nation’s ten regions, make up one-fifth of the population. These areas are major sites of production for Cameroon’s main agricultural export, palm oil, and are thus key to the country’s economy.

Officially there are two separate-but-equal systems in place within the country, but protests of misallocation of resources by this disaffected minority have a decades-long history. In the last two years, however, this conflict has descended into unprecedented violence, after initially peaceful protests were greeted by a brutal government crackdown. Local vigilantes known as “amba boys” have responded by taking up arms to fight for sovereignty, ushering in a civil war that has taken an estimated 420 civilian lives and displaced close to 250,000 people.

Against this backdrop, it is possible to problematize Biya’s “landslide victory.” Although Biya received 71.28 percent of votes cast, far ahead of his closest rival, Maurice Kamto, the polls were marked by low turnout. Some Anglophone rebels intentionally boycotted the election, while many more English-speakers were simply unable to vote, having fled the violence afflicting their homes. As few as 15 percent of potential voters in the Anglophone Southwest made it out to vote, while the Northwest managed just 5 percent, a situation that Osih, who hails from an English-speaking region in the Southwest, likened to apartheid.

This is not the first emotive term to be deployed to describe the conflict, in which escalating rhetoric has kept pace with the violence. Separatists have equated government suppression of their protests to “genocide,” while the military regards separatist agitators as “terrorists,” a particularly significant comparison for a state which is also battling Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram at its Northern border.

Biya took to social media to celebrate his victory on October 22, thanking Cameroonians for his re-election, simultaneously urging the populace to “take up, TOGETHER [sic], the challenges that confront us in ensuring a more united, stable and prosperous Cameroon.”